Shame--on both sides of the Atlantic: leave none behind!(Essay)

• Author: Hutson, Thomas R.

Everyone who knows anything about it agrees. It is shameful. No two ways about it. On both sides of the Atlantic, Our vaunted, noble goal on the battlefield to LEAVE NONE BEHIND does not apply to translators/interpreters, or "terps".

Sure, there is a provision of law that covers them from our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, I challenge anyone interested so ask the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a status report on the clearances that they must have before final issuance of a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV).

A seemingly hopeless, interminable backlog.

So, the intent of Congress is clear and the numbers have been increased in recent years to encompass the demand which, given the increasing peril in either country, is only increasing. Having launched a seat-of-the pants effort more than a year ago, it has borne no fruit. Everyone at State points the bureaucratic fingers in some other direction. And, apparently, no one wants to take on DHS or the FBI.

At the British Provincial Reconstruction Team in Mazar-e-Sharif (northern Afghanistan), we had a half-dozen "terps," with backgrounds as physicians, university students or just young men with a smattering of English who put their lives on the line for US. Admittedly, we were helping them help their country; but, their loyalties were not to Kabul or to Karzai. They were loyal to US or to the UK.

As if our administration of this legal means of coming to the U.S.A. were not bad enough; in a recent Daily Telegraph, writer Tim Collins chastised the British government for failing to help even David Cameron's "terp".

Being an unabashed Anglophile, albeit uncomfortable with the glut of true refugees being thwarted from doing anything other than subsisting near Calais, I wonder whether these programs are being administered jointly and darned effectively--if the purpose is to thwart their hopes and dreams.

Having questioned the wisdom...